Friday, February 26, 2010

LOST: big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff

I had a theory, now it's kind of in flux and filling with holes, given what we've seen and heard this week, that we might not be looking at two complete (or completely different) realities this season. Rather, we're seeing LOST2, a reality in which 815 didn't crash on the Island, which is underwater, and the Island snowglobe from LOST1, the pocket dimension that contains the Island on which 815 DID crash. The reality outside of the snowglobe has popped out of existence. I LOVE this idea, but hafta say that this would mean one REALLY sad thing: Desmond, Penny, and baby Charlie of LOST1 no longer exist. So, while I *really* like this catastrophic idea, I DO NOT WANT TO LOSE DESMOND (the one fashioned in LOST1).

Also, a couple of events in this week's episode threaten to perforate this notion.

1. Jacob tells Hurley that someone (singular or plural?) is coming to the Island. Of course, I'm hoping it's Desmond, but who knows?2. Jack's given mirror-views of off-Island locations.

These two occurrences speak to the world outside the snowglobe keepin on.

BUT... WHICH outside world...?

Another riff on the theory is that the Incident was not a divergence point between two realities, and in fact, it SUCCEEDED in changing the one-and-only single reality, resulting in the off-Island outside world rewriting itself from 1977 on, creating "LOST2." However, with the Island being the Island, and the source of the energy and setting of events responsible for this change, the self-correcting cosmos has flagged the Island itself as an anomaly, protected/immune from reality-changing ripples thanks to its part in causing the changes, its pocket dimensionality, and perhaps the fact that it had been moved in 2004. So, what I've been calling LOST2 is not a separate reality, but a reality written over the one we've watched for five seasons.

Also a fleeting "big picture" thought/theory that Widmore's "war" might be between realities. Altho his use of the word "war" in that case would've been more of a flourish. I don't see agents of one side fighting those of the other, but maybe an assertion of reality dominance/continuity, one over the other, one ultimately replacing the other. Altho, maybe there ARE agents from one side already in the other, orchestrating the events leading to the divergence in realities, because one of them is so f'd up and doomed that rewriting/replacing it is the best option. A better of all possible worlds. Last night's LOST2 Jack-and-David storyline, on the heels of Locke's last week, seems built to tell us that lives in this reality are not so (mundanely) doom and gloom after all. The little, everyday, things mean a lot, and the little things are mostly good, or at least open to be.

The idea that the outside world of LOST1 is gone was a possibility that occurred to me when the idea of changing history came up in season 4 or 5. When Jack talked about "going back" to Kate in the first flash forward the show gave us, I think that's what got me thinking about the Losties returning to the Island and changing history, to fix things. But a real change would have to be different from Desmond's time jumps, cuz "what happened, happened," right? So, I zanily theorized that they could return to the Island, fix things, but have to live the rest of their lives on the Island, in the snowglobe, unable to return to the outside world, but hopefully pleased w Island life and powers and content to watch from afar as their never-crashed selves would go on living their fantastically unfantastic and mundane lives.

I let the momentum of the show since then push the idea into the background, but it seems just a little more likely now, with this season, cuz all of the LOST1 storytelling (which began days after the Ajira crash in 2007) has happened exclusively on the Island. We haven't seen anything of the outside world after the time travellers are returned to 2007. But, like I said, that would mean that Desmond and Penny and anyone else who wasn't in the snowglobe at that time has been rendered non/never-existent.

Maybe this new visitor to the Island that Jacob expects made it into the snowglobe before then, but hasn't been able to reach/set foot on the actual itself for whatever reason, caught in some meteorological weirdness surrounding the return of the time-tossed Losties. Would love for it to be a Widmore private jet carrying Desmond's fam. Or, maybe the new visitor or visitors are from LOST2, and this is the concrete reveal to back up Juliet's "It worked."

Re-reading, this is pretty messy (copy/pasted/edited from emails w Z). I'll try to put these ideas in better order in another post soon.